THE CICAK.com

Part 2: Does your vote count? Not really…

Editor’s note: Parts one and two of this story were submitted simultaneously. No views were changed in the interim between their posting. Please do not restart discussions already ongoing in the comments section of part one.

Photo by Leap Kye
By JEREMY MAHADEVAN

In the first part of this article, we looked at the probabilistic arguments against voting, and concluded that since voting is very unlikely to be in an individual’s interest, (except for those who enjoy the rituals of democracy), then non-voters cannot be criticised for being unwise.

I pinpointed two homilies on voting: one by Keith Leong, which appeared on theCICAK, and another by Huzir Sulaiman, which appeared in The Star.

While these articles tacitly assume that voting is in your interest, their stated arguments tend to involve justification for voting – namely, that the vote is a duty and those who fail to fulfill it are acting irresponsibly. In other words, it’s not a good enough excuse to say that you won’t vote because your vote won’t count – the democrat would retort that you have a responsibility to vote, and that’s that.

One way to argue for the duty to vote is to say that voting is an institution kept alive by voters; for example, if everyone acted on the arguments against the value of voting that were presented in part one of this article, we’d have no polls at all – hence nobody should do so.

This argument relies on Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, which is loosely distillable into “How would you feel if everyone else acted the way you did?”

The argument is that you must avoid doing things that you wouldn’t want everyone else doing, such as telling lies, failing to recycle or not voting.

While this kind of reasoning might be a useful tool for disciplining children, in a practical sense it holds little meaning. The idea that hypothetical undesirable worlds can lend force to moral duties is highly problematic, despite being intuitively acceptable. The fact is that those worlds are not our world.

Even if they were to exist, within them the set of incentives would be altogether altered. As a warning to those who don’t vote, democrats postulate a bogeyworld in which nobody votes at all; however, in such a world the probability of a single vote counting would rise to one, giving you an immense incentive to turn up.

It just seems a little silly to consider such fantasy worlds as relevant, particularly when we factor in that voting is not like other categorical imperative stalwarts such as recycling or honesty, in that – as we have seen – individual votes are only appreciably beneficial at the margins.

Any Malaysian will agree that we all have the right to vote; the question is whether that right translates into a duty.

Rights are on occasion accepted as duties, such as in times of war, when a right to fight for your country is also a duty to do so; but we must be very wary of permitting a right to x to become a duty to x, if only because we run the risk of allowing those who value such rights to gain a kind of tyranny over us.

Take, for example, a conscientious objector of the Vietnam War – to him, there was no duty to participate in battle, but to others (who undoubtedly had a much stronger belief in the right to wage war), his duty to fight was a clear and undeniable fact. The question is whether or not the objector had a good reason to want to stay out of Vietnam.

So what good reason would a Malaysian have to want to stay out of the polling booth? One might be that a vote is by its very nature a sign of approval, one that some people might be loath to provide.

Perhaps they believe that the whole system needs an overhaul, and that by not voting they are signaling their belief in its failure.

Perhaps they are unable to decide between two candidates who seem equally bad (or good).

They might even be extreme monarchists, who believe that power ought to be handed back to the royals. If any of these are acceptable reasons not to vote, then the idea of the vote as a moral duty must be a rather draconian infringement of some people’s liberties.

These people are not merely too lazy or indifferent to vote (although there are strong arguments that laziness and indifference are perfectly acceptable reasons as well); rather, they have engaged with the political and found it wanting in a way that makes abstention their best possible move.

Staunch democrats tend to scoff at the idea of abstention as a significant political act, but it’s hard to see why.

If one takes Huzir Sulaiman’s word for it, abstainers are not “registering anything,” and are instead “erasing” themselves and “disemboweling” their citizenship.

“In short,” he sums, approximating the words of that great spreader of democracy, George W. Bush, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

But these words hardly reflect reality. In truth abstention has a serious impact – if it didn’t, people like Huzir would have no problems with it. It garners much attention and is taken – more so even than the spoiled ballot – as a reliable index of disaffection, disapproval and apathy within the electorate.

If you are faced with a set of unacceptable options, nobody should be able to force you to vote for what Huzir Sulaiman calls “the least worst”, as though in democracy one can never be allowed to have minimum standards.

Often, having exhausted this claim that abstention is meaningless, democrats declare that to avoid voting is to give up one’s right to complain about the government.

There doesn’t seem to be any coherent logic behind this disturbing assertion. It rests on the argument that to abstain is to give up the right to vote, and to give up the right to vote is to give up the right to be governed on your terms. But this is patently ludicrous.

An abstainer does not give up the right to vote, any more than a newspaper that refuses to print caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad gives up the right to free speech. Rather, the abstainer gives up the opportunity to vote, without giving up the right. An abstainer is still a citizen, and it would be hugely undemocratic to deny her a voice just because she failed to vote. As Huzir Sulaiman himself puts it, “Ongoing criticism, debate and dissent are vital.”

Why encourage dissent if, in the same breath, you’re going to deny people the right to dissent against the ballot?

The ideal of a liberal democracy is collective rule by a populace of free equals, and to remove the voices of non-voters would be to allow the institution of voting to run rampant over the populace. If my views lead me not to vote, it is my views that ought to be prioritised, not the vote.

At this particular point in time, when the Malaysian voting public has just delivered the country to a historical landmark, it may seem silly, churlish or even bitter to try and argue for the rights of the abstainer.

However, it is precisely during this time of democratic success that these arguments ought to be laid out. Considering that in many nations voters are offered a choice between a number of essentially identical, centrist, status quo-preserving parties, abstention is now a more powerful political tool than ever.

Those who believe in their right not to vote must stand up and defend it against the illiberal, undemocratic forces that threaten it.

What we should aim for is a Malaysia that gives a voice not only to supporters of the government, or the opposition, or fans of voting, but to all Malaysians.

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JEREMY MAHADEVAN is a contributor for theCICAK.

Jeremy dislikes writing bios of himself, but will write one if asked nicely. Having somehow found himself with a master’s degree in political theory, he now stares blankly for a living. He lives in London, misses his stolen bicycle and knows only one thing with absolute certainty: that Radiohead is the greatest band ever. Yes, better even than the Beatles.